The Jews of Biržai: The Last Sabbath

By Michael R. Bien

"Dusk approached, yet the lingering sun stubbornly revealed the ruthless efficiency that primal evil has when armed with bullets, power, and blind obedience. The sun itself was soon ashamed of the images it was forced to show. As the sun set and the Sabbath arrived, there was nobody alive to celebrate it. Just as the last trace of smoke esca

• Language: English
• Publisher: Menschenit
• Release date: Jan 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9798985022315

Book preview

JewsOfBirzai_MBien-Cover.jpg

Front Cover Image (top): Pictured here are some former residents or descendants from Biržai. Some witnessed, survived, or were murdered in the summer of 1941. The assigned numbers are matched with their names.

Front Cover Image (bottom): A picture of Biržai, circa 1915, reproduced by permission of Tomasz Wiśniewski.

Back Cover Image: The Watch Maker is a charcoal drawing created by Robert Kirsch.

This is a work of narrative non-fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents, and events portrayed in this book are largely factual though there is some slight restructuring of events and creative dialogue to effectively reproduce the daily lives and struggles of the people of Biržai. This is done minimally as extensive research into historical documents and personal interviews were conducted and memoirs are referenced that authenticate the events that occurred in Biržai in the summer of 1941 and sadly culminated in its holocaust on August 8, 1941.

The Jews of Biržai: The Last Sabbath. Copyright 2021 by Michael R. Bien. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Menschenit at [e-mail].

Copies of this book may be purchased through online retailers and independent bookstores or by contacting the author directly.

Front and Back Cover Design – JoAnn Barnes

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for Michael R. Bien

ISBN 979-8-9850223-0-8 (Paperback)

ISBN 979-8-9850223-2-2 (Hardback)

ISBN 979-8-9850223-1-5 (e-book)

First Edition: December 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by Menschenit, www.menschenit.com.

This book is dedicated to God, for the life He has given me, the joys He has brought to my life, His spiritual direction, and His guidance to always do the right things.

This book is dedicated to my family for tolerating my total immersion into Biržai and enabling my compulsion to complete this project so I could eulogize an entire community.

For the Jewish citizens of Biržai who, perished in the summer of 1941, and all victims of the Holocaust, who lost their lives in a most horrific fashion.

For the descendants of Biržai and survivors of the Holocaust who gave us life even though they were surrounded by death.

For all the people that I bothered tracking down every possible piece of data in various languages.

In memory of Gillian Kay, the feisty South Afrikaner, and another descendant from Biržai, who was murdered. May her spirit and gust for life inspire us all to live more tolerant lives.

Table of Contents

Foreword

Prologue

Part I. A 20-Year Simmer

Chapter 1: Returning Home

Chapter 2: Renewing Friendships

Chapter 3: Bagels and Castles

Chapter 4: Time to Grow Up

Chapter 5: Being Jewish in Biržai

Chapter 6: Memories

Chapter 7: Family in America

Chapter 8: Flying Mail

Chapter 9: Life Could Be a Dream

Chapter 10: Changing Places

Chapter 11: World War Again

Part II. Changing Landlords

Chapter 12: An Old Friend Comes to Town

Chapter 13: A New Boss

Chapter 14: Signed, Sealed, and Delivered

Chapter 15: Rising Tensions

Chapter 16: Things That Go Bump in the Night

Chapter 17: Russia Revisited

Chapter 18: Strudel

Chapter 19: Caught in the Crossfire

Chapter 20: Out in the Fields

Chapter 21: Protection Squadrons and Yellow Stars

Chapter 22: Peaceful Sabbath

Chapter 23: All Bets Are Off

Part III. The Null Hypothesis

Chapter 24: Dr. God

Chapter 25: A Spider’s Web

Chapter 26: Home, Not So Sweet Home

Chapter 27: No Work and No Play

Chapter 28: An Oasis of Hope

Chapter 29: Pain Partners

Chapter 30: New Places

Chapter 31: An Empty Train, Truck, and Promise

Chapter 32: Think Outside the Box

Chapter 33: Angels Among Devils

Chapter 34: We Are All Hasidic Now

Chapter 35: All Together Now

Chapter 36: What For?

Chapter 37: Not Even a Scratch

Chapter 38: The Aftermath

Chapter 39: Ghosts Reprise

End Notes

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Author’s Notes

Yizkor List of Names

End Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

Foreword

Written By: Abel and Glenda Levitt

We became actively involved with Lithuania about twenty years ago, where we focused on the town of Plungyan¹. Abel’s father was from Plungyan and many of his relatives, including his grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins were all murdered by local Lithuanians, supervised by two Germans in July 1941. We helped establish a Tolerance Center at the Saules Gimnazija in Plungyan and a couple of years later we established an annual art competition at the school, which has now grown to incorporate the inclusion of many additional schools in Lithuania. In 2011, we collected donations and erected a memorial wall with names of victims alongside the mass graves outside Plungyan. This was the first ever memorial in Lithuania where names of Holocaust victims were placed at the actual site of the mass graves.

While we were visiting Lithuania again in 2014, we learned from our friend Ingrida Vilkiene, responsible for Tolerance Centers throughout Lithuania, that we would be traveling to Birzh² to meet two special people. Neither of us had ever heard of Biržai and with some reluctance we agreed to go. After meeting with the impressive teachers, Vidmantas Jukonis and his son, Merūnas, they took us to meet Irute Varziene, the then mayor of the town. Having heard of what we had done in Abel’s ancestral town of Plungyan, Irute asked us if we would do something similar for Birzh and we agreed to help in some way.

Ten days later, while we were on holiday in Cape Town, South Africa, we went to visit Ben Rabinowitz, a friend and a renowned philanthropist. We approached him about donating to help our projects in Plungyan. Ben immediately and heatedly answered, Plungyan, I’ve got nothing to do with Plungyan! Go and ask Plungyaners. My family comes from the shtetl Birzh. We were astounded and intrigued to hear, once again, someone mention the same town we had never heard of until just recently. Ben was astonished to hear that not only had we just been to Birzh, but it was a functioning town. He had heard that it had been destroyed during World War II.

After we returned home to Israel, my sister Rolene and I discussed the fact that regretfully, we didn’t know our maternal grandmother’s maiden name, nor where she had been born. We only knew she had married in Rakishok. Not long after that discussion, Abel, by sheer coincidence, was at a shiva house and recognized someone whom he thought was related to Glenda’s late mother. Abel approached Max Pesach, and a meeting was arranged in Max’s hometown in Beersheba, Israel, to examine his family tree. After paging through Max’s family tree looking for any linkage to our grandmother, Rolene and I suddenly, found our grandmother’s name, Ada Blume, including her maiden name, Peskowitz. To our absolute astonishment, we discovered that she was born in Birzh. We were initially doing this project based on our promise to the Mayor and Ben’s connection to Birzh, to help honor the story of the Jews of Birzh in a town we had never heard of, and now we had our own very personal connection to this town.

With the project taking shape, we were off and running and we flew to the United States to meet with and interview Allan Evans, from Queens, New York, to learn from him and make a connection with Jonathan Dorfan, from Palo Alto, California. We returned home to Israel, now with the spark and inspiration on what we needed to do and how to undertake this project. Together, we agreed with Ben Rabinowitz, that the Birzh project would be similar to what we had completed in Plungyan. We would build a memorial wall with names, engage with the students, help to create a Tolerance Center in the high school, honor the Savers of Jews, and we would also conduct a tour for Birzh descendants.

Next, we visited Yad Vashem to examine the list of victims murdered in the forest of Birzh. Sadly, we found the names of a few of our family members that had been murdered on August 8, 1941. Our commitment grew with intensity as I became inextricably bound to the place of my roots and my sorrow.

Word spread quickly of the planned tour to Birzh; inquiries streamed in and connections were made from Israel, South Africa, England, France, Canada, and the United States. We were struck by an email we received from a man named Michael Bien. People responded to our suggestions about interacting with locals, but it was Michael who answered with an intriguing idea. He suggested that we ask every tour participant to write about themselves and their connection to Birzh and then present that information during the tour to foster a sense of community.

We gave this thought-provoking proposition serious thought. We considered the fact that there would be a gathering of approximately fifty people together from all over the world for one or two weeks with nothing in common other than their Birzh ancestry. Michael’s initiative resulted in an unforgettable evening in Birzh of shared stories. This evening of fostering connections was marked with warmth, instant bonding, a comradeship, and a feeling of being together with landsleit³ that has remained ongoing within our group to this date. It was an outstanding evening. Michael absorbed every aspect of our multi-faceted journey and returned home with a burning desire to express what he experienced into creating a pulsating, living tale of the Jews of Birzh.

Michael is a man who understands the power of the written word.

This book is a follow-up to the 2019 tour and memorial dedication. It is a hugely important vehicle to help remember the names of those murdered. Michael’s book is no less necessary than the memorial.

To craft this book, Michael compiled both his tour experiences and his deep research required to cover daily life, jobs and work, religious life, education and schools, dating, marriage, children, culture and leisure activities. This book remembers and describes the daily life of Jews leading to the period that started with the advent of Nazism in the 1930s.

Because of Michael and this book, I made a startling discovery. After receiving the first draft of his book, I sat down with a cup of coffee and immersed myself into the bygone days of Birzh. As Michael’s story unfolded, drawing a picture of daily life, I suddenly came across a sentence which took my breath away: Motel Levitan and his wife, Chaya (nee Pesakhovich), and their baby son, Leiba. I had just discovered more Birzh family. I phoned Rolene with this great news, who said, So carry on reading, there may be more to discover. Sure enough, she was right; Motel and Chaya are mentioned once again, this time with the lively little Leiba and their new baby Golda. Then came the extraordinarily heart-wrenching revelation in Michael’s description of the day of the murder, where he describes in painstaking detail the events that led to 2,400 souls murdered on one day, including some of our family members.

Thank you, Michael, for giving us readers an invaluable gift of putting into words the daily life, the joys, the sadness, the pressures, the tensions, and the terrible end—the story of our ancestors.

The Jews of Biržai draws the reader gently into the pre-World War II life of Birzh Jews—the everyday normalcy, the joys, sorrows, and concerns that were experienced. The reader participates as the story evolves from normalcy to concern, to anxiety, to fear, and finally to the resignation of betrayal, hopelessness, and the horror of an inevitable reality of fate.

In The Jews of Biržai, our work in Birzh culminates. This book will help keep alive the feeling we experienced during the ceremony that dedicated the memorial. While only a handful of the relatives of the murdered were able to attend the tour, your book memorializes not only the lives of our relatives, but the life and death of the Birzh shtetl. Yes, there were some difficult parts to read because of the horrors that occurred in the summer of 1941, but there were also many positive and hopeful stories from both the Jewish people who suffered through this time and the righteous who helped and saved some of them. We thank Michael, from the bottom of our hearts, for his passion, commitment, and friendship, and for this book that provides a legacy of the shtetl and the Jewish inhabitants, including our ancestors.

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1 Plungė is a northwestern town in Lithuania, Plungyan in Yiddish.

2 Biržai (Lithuanian), Birzh (Yiddish), and Birsen (German) are the multiple references of the town.

3 Landsleit means fellow Jews in Yiddish, those who come from the same district or town, especially in Eastern Europe.

Prologue

Like many Americans, I descend from immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life for themselves, their children, grandchildren, and, ultimately, for me and my family. Through my genealogical research, I discovered I am an ethnic mix of German, Lithuanian, and Estonian, and a third-generation American Jew.

While growing up in Philadelphia, I was told very little about my heritage, though I was always interested in learning more about my Eastern European ancestors. What had been shared with me was my distant relatives in Europe were Jewish, like me, and they were raised Orthodox, not like me. When I fell in love and married Teresa, a lovely Irish-Italian, Roman-Catholic woman, I moved a little further away from the traditions of my extended family, but remained curious about who they were as people.

Teresa and I lived in England during our first year of marriage. We returned home to America in the fall of 1994, newlyweds eager to set down roots and build our lives here. Among the first people we visited was my grandmother, Reba Kirsch (nee Chait), whom we called Mom Mom (figure 1). Sitting in her small kitchen in Philadelphia, eating cookies and drinking tea, Teresa peppered Reba with questions about our family history. Traditionally, Reba had been the best source for stories about everyone in our family and quickly filled Teresa in with everything she could remember about everybody. While Teresa heard them for the first time, I sipped my tea and listened with fresh ears, watching both of them enjoy each other’s company.

Figure 1. Reba Kirsch in Philadelphia in 1952. Permission of Phyllis Soufer (nee Kirsch).

At one point, Reba rose quickly from her chair and almost sprinted to the infamous family drawer. You know the drawer I mean; we all have one in our kitchens. She shuffled through it for a minute before returning to the table with a small pile of papers and suddenly…no, not suddenly…more like finally—that pile of papers in her hand is what led me to write this book for the many generations who will follow us, for those who will now know and I pray never forget, the Jews of Biržai.

Reba’s papers inspired Teresa and me to begin conducting what wound up to be years of research filled with sprees of letter writing and cold calling, trips to libraries to read microfiche, and hours of asking and answering questions with family members, so we could publish a coffee-table book about our families.

What my grandmother handed to us almost forty years ago is what we now refer to as genealogical gold. We use that phrase for a couple of reasons. First, it is truly priceless. Literally, and from our perspective, of course, you cannot put a price tag on certain original documents, pictures, and signatures from relatives. Second, the information contained within them solved huge research questions. Finding such papers often happens during the research process; rarely do they kick-start a project, and seldom does such an ah-ha moment get pulled out of a junk drawer and placed into the researcher’s lap.

We knew immediately that the gold mined from my grandmother’s junk drawer was valuable and important information regarding the family history. So, guess what we did with it? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! Sure, we were intrigued by the aged, yellowed, one-hundred-plus-year-old documents, but we had not yet coined the phrase genealogical gold and didn’t quite have the same reaction we would thankfully later embrace. As newlyweds, we had other things on our minds. We politely accepted the ancient, handwritten Yiddish letters and postcards, along with a much-worn ketubah⁴ (held together by strips of Band-Aids), thanked her, and went on our way.

We soon found a place to live and proceeded to perform what amounted to an ironic symmetry: we transferred Reba’s genealogical gold from her junk drawer to ours. As the years slid by, we proceeded to have the predictable family of the dog, cat, and two kids that everyone dreams about. The letters were safe. They remained hidden from daylight for decades. Although protected, they couldn’t translate themselves. They continued to grow more fragile from age. So, too, were our parents and grandparents, the folks we needed to unlock the family secrets from the old country.

At one point, when my parents were preparing to downsize from their Northeast Philadelphia home to a new community, my mother Phyllis Soufer (nee Kirsch) handed Teresa and me bags of old black and white photos: picnics, bar mitzvahs, weddings, school photos, and the whole gambit that families collect through the years. As we perused the musty-smelling box of old pictures, our inquisitive sons walked into the room. Our five-year-old asked, Who are these people? and without knowing it, he got this whole megillah⁵ off and running. Because the older generations lacked the insight to know their progeny might want to know the answer to that very basic question, they might have written names on the back of the pictures. But no, that would be way too easy. They must have believed we would be up for the challenge to find out.

So, there we were. Fate had nudged an octogenarian grandmother to put in our hands documents over a hundred years old that nobody could read, then prompted a sexagenarian mother to give us one-hundred-plus-year-old pictures nobody could identify, and blessed us with an innocent son who asked a simple question that nobody could answer. Yes. Finding the answers was our mission. And we finally decided to accept it. As you will see from the next set of chapters and stories, we got way more than we bargained for in our research. As they say, the rest is history, and that will be explained in this book.

Sadly, in 2003, Mom Mom (Reba) passed away just as we started the project. Of all the family members who assisted and contributed to it, she was the most engaged. Neither in her kitchen in 1994, nor on her death bed in 2003, did she know where her immigrant, Yiddish-speaking parents were from. Russia was the standard answer, or the old country. But, thanks to Google Translate, we were able to translate one Cyrillic letter at a time on a postmark from a 1905 postcard that she had given to us (figure 2). Those letters pointed to a small shtetl in Lithuania called Biržai.

After conducting some basic research on the town we’d just discovered, it immediately became very clear that something really awful happened there in August 1941. Something much more than awful.

Twenty-four hundred people were massacred.

Men: 720 killed.

Women: 780 killed.

And children: 900 killed.

Figure 2. Postcard from Leib Khait to Isaac Khait from Biržai to Amsterdam in 1906. Reproduced by permission of Phyllis Soufer.

On a hot, humid, ill-fated day, August 08, 1941, 2,400 people were murdered. Massacred. The official records tell the world that 900 children, 780 women, and 720 men were murdered between eleven o’clock in the morning and seven o’clock in the evening on that single day, in that small, once-serene town in northern Lithuania. It was an otherwise unremarkable summer morning when none of the doomed men, women, and children had any expectation that death would come so suddenly, so mercilessly on that day.

The massacre of those innocent, defenseless people was just one incident among many of slaughter and mass executions committed throughout Europe by killing squads of Nazi German soldiers and their local collaborators under the swastika flag of the German Third Reich. It was part of their insane leader’s master plan to remove the Jewish people from Europe, and later from the face of the earth, a plan ominously titled the Final Solution.

The research and the link to Biržai made the Holocaust very personal for me and my family. My great-grandfather came to the United States in 1905. He had never mentioned the seven sisters who had remained there, six of whom would be killed later in the Holocaust, a few slaughtered on that fateful day in Biržai.

I have since added multiple names of my family members, and many others who were murdered there, to the Yad Vashem Shoah databases. Through this book, I am striving to personalize and memorialize as many of the 2,400 who had died that day as I can by depicting the rise and genocide of the Jewish population in Biržai, Lithuania, as seen through the eyes of survivors, and based on their memories.

My intention of this book is to remember the fallen by changing your perspectives of them. They will no longer be nondescript murder victims. Instead, they will be real people with real names, lives, families, faces, stories, and hopes and dreams.

Author’s note: The use of italics scattered occasionally throughout the book is selected to present historical information and events which are closely related to the specific time or place depicted in the current chapter.

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4 Ketubah is the standard marriage contract that Jewish law requires a groom to provide to his bride on their wedding day.

5 Megillah means scroll or volume in Hebrew. Usage translates to a long involved story or account.

Part I:

A 20-Year Simmer

One Man’s Dream Is Another Man’s Nightmare…It’s All About Your Prospective People

Timothy Pina

Chapter 1:

Returning Home

Steady clouds of billowing steam dutifully trailed above the long line of wooden boxcars as the old weather-beaten locomotive pulled its cargo closer to its final destination. The decades-old steam engine had labored bravely to cover its 1,000-mile journey, stopping only twice for the necessary coal and water it required to keep it moving forward. Fortunately, the distance it covered was mostly on flat ground with few mountains and nearly zero twists and turns along the way—moving steadily on the straight line of railroad track stretching monotonously westward from Kazan, Russia to Biržai, Lithuania. The only landmark of any importance on the route was Moscow, Russia’s capital city, which lay at the mid-way point between the two towns. Moscow held no interest in either of the small towns, and the people in those small towns thought even less often about Russia’s capital city.

The passengers in this long line of boxcars were completing the return part of a roundtrip that originated from Biržai five years earlier. Both journeys were thrust upon the Jews of Biržai by the order of government authorities who decreed their removal from their homes. The families were not consulted prior to either move. They were not asked for their opinion. Cautioned by a long history of anti-Semitism, they said very little, heard even less, and never questioned authority. Life was tenuous for Jewish people living in Europe. It was more so in 1920. With acquired wisdom, they understood things happened when they did. The present was their immediate concern and tomorrow was the extent of their planning for the future. They knew their future was in their own hands only until it suddenly wasn’t. The good news this time rested in the knowledge this train would take them home to Lithuania, to a place where they might be safe, and they could all renew their lives as they were in 1915.

Biržai, a small town, barely more than a village at that time, was nestled between two rivers in northeastern Lithuania near the borders of two neighboring countries: Latvia to the north and Russia to the west. Though some of the people in Biržai knew the train was coming, no one knew exactly when it would arrive. That’s how the governments worked in Eastern Europe after the First World War. The war, praised at its beginning as ‘the war to end all wars,’ had devastated the continent. After four years of destruction (1914–1918), all of the countries in Europe, both the victors and the conquered, were crippled: their economies and political and social institutions were in disorder. Political unrest, economic stagnation, extreme unemployment, and starvation were rampant. The most notable example in 1920 was on Biržai’s western border where Russia suffered post-war chaos after a bloody revolution in 1917 forced Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate his crown in March 1917. He and his wife, Alexandra, and their children were held captive and later murdered in July 1918. Political and social upheaval threatened all of the countries across Europe as the train of boxcars continued its steady course to Biržai.

In the thirtieth hour of the journey, the thunderous roar of the locomotive and its train of cars was reduced considerably as the engine slowed from thirty miles an hour to ten, then to five as it began its approach into the train depot. The repetitive clackety-clack noise of the boxcars’ wheels on the rusty steel rails grew more noticeable as the engine quieted and the train crawled to a stop alongside the platform, successfully delivering its cargo to the quiet village of Biržai.

Figure 3. A European map that highlights the location of Biržai in northern Lithuania. Reproduced by permission of © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Once the engine and the boxcars halted, a deafening silence remained. There was no sound, not even birds chirping, as the dying clouds of steam descended onto the boxcars. The chalky white clouds drifted eerily past the cars, unveiling locked and windowless, shabby, wooden structures bolted onto wheels. There was no sound coming from inside these cars while the passengers inside waited anxiously for the next instruction to be issued from the train’s Russian crewmen.

Without windows, and without sounds coming from within the train, the people on the platform stared at what appeared to be a ghost train. There was no sign of life. The cars were battered and old, a mixture of thirty-two and forty-foot-long units. None of the cars looked safe. They were falling apart; most of them pre-dated the First World War by one or two